Thread by @kamilazdybal

📄 Here's my take on literature review and note-taking in grad school 🙃 ↓

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📄 I take my notes on the papers that I'm reading in Notion.

I have a Notion page template that I duplicate each time I read a new paper:

The template has some useful metadata: the year of the publication, title, web bookmark to the online version, authors, number of citations or any additional comments that I want to make for myself (e.g. Really cool paper! 🚀).

I also made a couple of tags ready to select:

Then I start taking notes!

As the first thing, I write down two sentences:

► What is this paper about?
► How is this paper relevant to my research?

This helps me to distill the paper to the main message on what it's about and how it links to my research.

Next come bullet points for the main contributions of the paper.

Writing this down early on helps a lot in understanding the bigger picture of the paper!

Most of the time, I can fill in this section just by reading the abstract.

Then, I take general notes on anything I find worth saving for later. I usually fill in this section with plain text or with screenshots from the paper.

Notion also makes it easy to write down equations!

If the paper inspired me to try something in my own research, I write it down in the Ideas & thoughts section:

Finally, I use active recall if there is any new information that I'd like to remember.

I use the toggle feature → as a heading, I write down a question for myself and inside the toggle, I write the answer to the question.

This way, I can test myself every once in a while!